juhaz writes: "Your data is worth more if you give it away", said EU Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes, who announced a new Open Data Strategy for Europe this morning, with the hopes of positioning the EU as the global leader in the re-use of public sector information.

The Commission proposes to boost the existing 2003 Directive on the re-use of public sector information by:

Making it a general rule that all documents made accessible by public sector bodies can be re-used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, unless protected by third party copyright;

Establishing the principle that public bodies should not be allowed to charge more than costs triggered by the individual request for data (marginal costs); in practice this means most data will be offered for free or virtually for free, unless duly justified.

Making it compulsory to provide data in commonly-used, machine-readable formats, to ensure data can be effectively re-used.

Introducing regulatory oversight to enforce these principles;

Massively expanding the reach of the Directive to include libraries, museums and archives for the first time; the existing 2003 rules will apply to data from such institutions.